Parallella: Supercomputer for Embedded Systems

Speaker: Ray Hightower, Wisdom Group & ChicagoRuby

Wednesday, December 09, 2015

5:45 pm (Social Hour, light refreshments)

6:30 pm Presentation

Loyola University Water Tower Campus (Chicago/Michigan Area)

111 E. Pearson Street, Chicago IL 60611

Beane Ballroom (13th Floor, Lewis Towers) Campus map

Admission: Free, General Admission, open to the public

Supercomputing should be available for everyone who wants
it. With that mission in mind, a team of engineers created Parallella, an
18-core supercomputer that’s a little bigger than a credit card. Parallella is
open source hardware; the circuit diagrams are on GitHub and the machine runs
Linux. Icing on the cake: Parallella is the most energy efficient supercomputer
on the planet, and you can buy one for about $150 (USA).

You might think of Parallella as a Raspberry Pi, but with 18
cores instead of two. This presentation will show how to get up and running
with Parallella, and why developers might care about supercomputing. Why does
parallel computing matter? How can developers use parallel computing to deliver
better results for clients? Let’s explore these questions together.

Ray Hightower is founder of WisdomGroup and organizer of
ChicagoRuby, WindyCityRails, and WindyCityThings, a new conference for IoT. He
has visited every state in the USA and now he’s working his way through Earth’s
continents. He holds a Bachelors in Computer Science from the University of
Illinois at Chicago.

While there will be light refreshments available, feel free to "brown bag" it and bring in food from the outside to eat during the social hour.